Lewis and Clark
We’re going to include, for clarity’s sake, who is writing which portion of the blog, although it should be noted that there are moments in which I (Karyssa) will add some Karyssa-isms in the section N wrote and N will add some Nick-isms/knowledge in the section I wrote.
We’ve been riding the Lewis and Clark trail for more than a week now, and thinking a lot about the Native Americans they encountered.
(Karyssa Writing)
On August 8 we went to the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck, and may I just say, they’re awesome; a free museum with exhibits that range from dinosaurs, horse evolution, Native American history, and the current North Dakota culture.
They have the original Pictograph by Stone Man illustrating the arrest and murder of Sitting Bull’s in 1890. Nick was beside himself with the memory of seeing it reproduced in Dee Brown’s monumental Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; here was the original, in color, the horses and hills in yellows and browns, the US Cavalry in lapis lazuli, and the blood spurts in garish red!
Somehow, probably due to my disdain for history, I never got the full grasp of what Euro-Americans did to Native Americans. I knew, of course, that they were slaughtered. But after visiting this museum, I wanted to know more.
Sitting Bull’s Original Grave Stone
Y’all. For thousands and thousands of years, Native Americans were living on this land. They had claim on it, and each tribe knew whose land was whose. Their populations were estimated to be around 5 million to 15 million.
But listen. Some fucked up shit happened. Frigging the US government “authorized 1,500 wars, attacks, and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people.” We’re number one! …?
The US just went ham on these folks, like, “Left, right, left, right, left, right, Kill!” By the time the Indian Wars were over, some 250,000 Natives were left. And then, do you know what we did?!
We sent them to Indian fucking Boarding Schools. Beginning in the 1870s Euro-Americans basically kidnapped children of Native Americans and put them in a boarding school where the kids were physically and verbally abused and were forbidden against using their native tongue and forced to speak English.
Much of their culture was lost due to this practice that lasted well into the 1960s. The 19-mother-frigging-60s, y’all! A mere 60 years ago!
Though, I suppose that shouldn’t be all that hard to believe with what China is doing to the people of Hong Kong and what we’re doing to kids of illegal immigrants. I suppose not all that much has changed, because for whatever reason we still value our laws, our borders, and our self-righteousness over the wellness of human beings – never mind kids.
The wild thing is how insanely hypocritical the US has been about borders and laws, considering we have given time and time again, sections of land to different Native American tribes (never mind how the land we give them isn’t their land, rather it is land that is difficult to live off and has little value to the US) during peace treaties, and do you know what we do when we find out that the land has value to us after all? We move their land.
We tell them to move all their shit some 200+ miles in the dead-ass of winter with only a few days to do so or else be fucking killed. Killed, y’all. Why? Because the US decided that the rules THEY MADE were no longer convenient for them. Fucking hell.
Let me calm down and move on to the 9th of August.
We took a trip to the Lewis and Clark Interpretative Center, Fort Mandan, and Knife River Indian Village Historic site on the sprawling, sandy, Missouri River.
These were pretty frigging cool.
Let’s start from the last and work back.
The Knife River site was pretty neat-o. We got to see where the Hidatsa built their earthlodges. They had winter and summer homes, and the earthlodges were a temporary build for the winter. They were really cool. Also! In the Hidatsa tribe, the women did most of the work in building these homes and were therefore the homeowners.
Next we have Fort Mandan. First of alllll. They – let – us – hold – a – blunderbuss. What the heck is a blunderbuss, you might ask. It’s a gun. A really, really old and heavy gun.
They had two docents there who were eager to share their knowledge about the fort. This was a remake of the original fort due to the original having been flooded by the nearby river.
During the Lewis and Clark expedition, the two stayed here for a whole winter. They said that without help of the Mandan tribe, they likely would not have made it through.
The Chief is quoted as saying, “If we feast, you feast; if we starve, you starve.” And, it’s reported, that he was true to his word; the food was shared equally among the travellers and the tribe.
This is also believed to be the place where Lewis and Clark met Sacagawea (or Sakakawea or Sakajawea, depending on which tribe you believe her to be from). I have to say, this woman is such a mother frigging badass. They think she delivered her baby in Fort Mandan. And she carried that kid with her throughout the rest of the expedition. The Rest Of The Expedition!!! No big deal, just gonna go explore uncharted waters west of here. Like, what?! No thank you! She’s amazing.
Okay, so Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. Fun fact! You can find the campsites of Lewis and Clark with a mercury detector because their poo contained mercury. 😀 Is that funny to anyone else or just me?
Something that really boggles my mind (as someone who never really paid attention to history, this comes as almost incomprehensible), the Lewis and Clark expedition was a mere 200 years ago (1803 was when it started). That seems like so recent. Especially when you consider that we didn’t know what was west of like Missouri. Las Vegas wasn’t a thing. Now look at that place! I think that’s pretty wild.
All of this makes me wonder about Palestinian vs Israeli territory. Will the Israeli’s be looking back 200 years from now and wonder in horror at the damage they bestowed upon them? Will they see all the land that once was Palestinian land, will they see all the treaties and agreements they made and then ignored to end the establisment of settlements on land they both agreed was Palestinian?
Y’all. There’s a lot of atrocities going on in this world. And it always seems remarkable how similar it is to other land’s histories or their own histories. Could we all just get along, now? That’d be great. Kaithnxbaiiiiiii.
(Nick Writing)
The 10th found us at Little Missouri State Park in the “badlands” of ND, and that put us on the “High Road” (Route 2, mainly) across the northern farmlands of the state, whose second largest crop happens to be sunflowers.
The Native American tribes here would also grow sunflowers, bordering their corn and beans, because they looked good, apparently! Some tribes, like the Assiniboine, Hidatsa and Mandan, who assisted L&C during the winter of 1804, would supply the settlers and forts with corn and then pelts before (of course) things went south.
The discovery of gold in the 1860’s was the final straw, but relations had been going down almost since the beginning. While the fur trade kept relations with the Plains Indians copacetic for a while, the growing number of white settlers, who were often practically barred from owning land in Europe, wanted to grab what they could here, and could only see the “red man” as the other.
The next day we were at Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s North Unit, with soooo many buffalo. Apparently, they are being genetically “re-diversified” with the help of some cattle breeds, which is controversial to some experts, but it’s great to see a herd of this size, 75-100 by our count, outside of Yellowstone.
Also, they had prairie dogs by the thousands, on such a scale that can be found on maps of the park!
But perhaps the most surprising animal sighting was the pronghorn, or American Antelope as we call them. We’ve only seen a handful, but they’re striking, and by the way, they’re not pronghorn deer, or pronghorn goat, or sheep, or anything; they are a stand-alone endemic critter who’s been here since the mastodon (or mammoth) and that giant cat with the super-long tusks and whose closest living relative is the friggin giraffe! You go pronghorn!
The 12th of August was spent at the South Unit and learned about Roosevelt’s early ranching efforts here, before becoming President and after watching his mother and wife die on the same day. That’s a rough day, no doubt, but that his wife died during childbirth might have made a difference. (Pssh, back then so many women died in childbirth; 40% of all women, over all time, anthropologists estimate.)
The other major theme of the past week revolves around fossils. As a kid in Kilkenny, Ireland, I had a friend who was slumming it from London, was a few years my senior, and who owned a leather satchel and an odd-shaped hammer. He would take me hunting for fossils in in limestone quarries around town, as many kids do.
When I was a kid in Kilkenny, Ireland, my friends and I would play “cowboys and Indians” and I, always the underdog, would come up with creative names that I thought sounded Indian.
Well here we are in Montana, and my fav indian name is now “Four Bears” because this dude, not a steareotype, but a real man, in a real time and place, killed a Cheyenne brave in hand-to-hand combat and in doing so, apparently fought like four bears. Just imagine it!
Now imagine seeing, in the famous Makoshika State park, and with your own eyes, the distinct grey of the Hell Creek Formation, laid down at the end of the dinosaur’s Cretaceus period, separated from the sandy over-layers of the Fort Union formation, which is sediment later washed down from the Rockies, and which, being free of dino fossils, provides the best evidence for the “catastrophic” theory of their demise, and you’ll begin to understand why Montana is blowing my mind.
We’ve only made it to the Eastern side of this state, so are only in the foothills of the Rockies, but that range is already making its influence clear to us. For instance, the rivers–the Missouri, the Yellowstone–run north here, which is weird to us, but only until you learn that they originally flowed into Hudson Bay and were only diverted into the Mississippi basin when they ran into a wall of ice from the Wisconsinite Ice Age.
For another instance, the grey and super-fine sediments alongside found every river and lake reveal the bentonite–found in your kitty-litter and pond liner, as it can hold up to five times its volume in water, and called the “mineral with 1,000 uses”—and which was exuded from the Rockies when they were young and volcanic.
Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota are buried in this stuff, but it apparently landed on a wetter variation of these deserts and settled on the bottom of the ocean, allowing dinosaur blood and the like to form pockets of gas on top of it.
We even saw a thin layer of lignite, the poor cousin of anthracite, which caught fire in the 1950’s and didn’t go out til the 1977! An area the size of your HS gym collapsed some 12′, and it left amazing chimney’s of porcellainite, an almost glass-like rock. The flint and speerhead materials from this area were so esteemed that they were traded as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.
(Karyssa Writing)
It’s Thursday, Aug 13, and tomorrow is Brendan’s birthday, and, more importantly, the day that Avatar: Legend of Korra comes out on Netflix. I kid, of course (though it does come out tomorrow).
Currently we are sitting in Crystal Lake National Forest, where it is 48 degrees out, a drop of nearly 50 degrees from yesterday, where we stayed a mere 5 hours east of here at Fort Peck Lake. So, the temperature change, while dramatic, is a huge welcome.
Yesterday, after the mind-blowing knowledge drop given to us by Makoshika State Park, we visited Fort Union Trading Post. And may I just say, it was impressive.
It’s a trading post from the 1840s or there abouts that was owned by the American Fur Trading Company. Even though it isn’t military, it is built like an actual fort. This is because this post was the “most important” of its time due to the different tradings that happened between multiple different tribes and Euro-Americans.
Each Euro-American that worked the post was married into a different tribe that traded there. That way, the negotiations would be happening among families, and they would be less likely to kill each other. If a trade went awry, the could always tell the Chief of their family tribe, and he’d ultimately take care of it.
The walls of the fort made the Native Americans feel safer in trading because it would be much more difficult for thieves to waltz in and steal something. It was revealing that the tribes themselves asked for the fort to be built, which counters the simplistic narrative many of us have about trade being forced upon the first peoples; of course they didn’t want smallpox, but they did want the trade goods the Europeans had, fabrics especially.
The docent there greeted us in multiple different tribal languages (though he admitted to knowing only the greetings). And told us the above.
As well, he told us about how tribes figured out that they could trade with the Inuits to get seal blubbers in order to make for a waterproof layer that they could wear under their buffalo pelts.
The trade routes developed by these indigenous peoples put the lie to John Locke’s claim that native Americans didn’t develop the land they lived on, and thus it was morally permissible for Europeans to take it.
Another random fun fact he gave was that the Blackfeet killed a white buffalo and knew it to be a sacred item to the Hidatsa. So, y’all. Listen to what I’m about to say. They traded the white buffalo for 200 horses! 200 of them! If that’s not an advantage to knowing your customer base, I dunno what is.
Then we went touring the fort and found out another bit of info, y’all might enjoy. Still in the 1840’s -ish, the Northern Plains Tribe saw for the first time a painting that was so life-like, that they walked up to a painting of a man and attempted to shake hands with him. They were so surprised by its likeness of a real person, that they could not understand exactly what it was. They also had been exposed to numerous diseases, smallpox being one, due to the germ exchange that occurred at the trading post. But, because they had never encountered these ailments before, they had no idea what was going on and only knew that there was a correlation between the trading post with its life-like paintings and the dying off of their people.
So they thought the paintings were causing them to die off. I imagine they must have thought they worked similar to how people used to think voodoo dolls worked.
Anyway, in order to ease their minds, this guy at the trading post painted a picture of his dog to show them that the picture of the dog could exist at the same time that the dog existed. But y’all! LISTENNNN TO MEEEE!!! I am not making this up! The dog frigging died!
And they were convinced! They were like, “Naw, fam! We frigging knew y’all were up to some shady shit, and here it is.” So frigging funny. But also sad that the dog died. Can you imagine?! Kills me.
Fri August 14
It’s Brendan’s birthday!
(Nick Writing)
We’ve spent the last two nights at Crystal Lake in the, surprise-surprise, Lewis and Clark National Forest, south of Lewistown and in the geo-center of the state. Why two nights – a first for us? Because it’s freaking beautiful, that’s why, and for $10 a night, with free potable H2O to boot! The milky way last night/this am/while we peed was the best since the Log Slide in MI (but as that may have been a month ago, and the last time the ignorant moon showed its face, who knows).
It seemed as though the sky were an animal skin stretched out across a base of trees that held up the drum and we were but little ants inside, watching Nature do her most stunning piece yet.
For twelve miles, we traversed two ridge lines that circle this pristine lake today, pushing the children beyond their capacities, and met a cool local from Billings and his wife and kids–who were riding the struggle bus moreso than ours–on the trail outside of the Ice Cave and he gave us the skinny on the northern parts of MT, which promises much beside Covid closures.
We’re wondering whether we need bear repellant, as we’re in both Black and Grizzly country thesedays. Apparently, they have come to associate gunshots with prey, so that hunters have to quickly dress and split before they show up!
(Karyssa Writing)
Today is the 16th and was a hotel night yesterday, which also means a laundry day today.
Yesterday we walked a beautiful, overgrown trail with flowers that I meant to pick so I could press and send them along with the letters I’ve been writing. But they usually end up mangled at the end of the trip, and I hate to pick a flower only to throw it away. Just know, there are so many different types of wildflowers that I wish I could share with y’all. I’m consistently beside myself.
Other than that, when we started, I was a little skeptical of the falls due to the fact that the wash that we crossed numerous times was all dried up for a good mile of the hike. Soon enough though, we reached the part where the water reached and continued to these absolutely gorgeous cascading waterfalls and climbed to the top of those falls to find a cute little spring sitting under a concave in the mountain.
Daisy and Frida have been troopers. We had to carry Frida two or so miles for the hike the day before (mostly due to the rocky terrain).
And Daisy probably could have made it without being carried, but I was concerned about heat exhaustion. She would work herself to death without ever complaining if she thought it would please us. So, her baba carried her a mile about halfway through the hike.
Anyway, yesterday they were perfectly happy to go from the 12 mile hike to the 7 mile hike, though they seemed restless last night and ready for some more exercise.
And now we’re all caught up. Here we are, sitting in the hotel room (eventually laundromat), trying to figure out what we’re doing next. We’re following these other vanlifers on Instagram and are hoping to meet up with them in the next few days. We’ll see what happens!